My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 28 April 2020

Green New Deal or Business as Usual?

Recently Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe and Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy addressed the national cabinet.  PM Morrison said they made it clear “business as usual when it comes to the policy we had prior to the election will need to be reconsidered on the other side”.

That’s a welcome change from Scotty from Marketing, who had previously touted a quick ‘snap back’ to business as usual.

Nonetheless, it raises the question of what form the new economy would take post COVID-19.

Will it be a continuation of neo-liberalism, which essentially means unregulated capitalism, or something more attuned to the needs of the planet and the welfare of its people?

Two recent newspaper stories clearly showed the two opposing paths open to the government, which in its remaining two years could take either route.

One way forward was a story about Energy Minister Angus Taylor, who is moving ahead with a new program that includes measures designed to prop up coal-fired electricity generators and weaken environmental protections.

I won’t devote any more of my precious column inches to such backward-looking nonsense, but instead focus the story of a much more useful proposal. From the Greens, it was a proposal for the Green New Deal, which I have previously mentioned but that now warrants a closer look.

The concept of a Green New Deal originated in the USA. It was taken up by the new young progressive Democrats elected to congress in 2018 and was amplified by Bernie Sanders during his recent presidential nomination campaign. Here in Australia it has been adopted by the Greens and given a specific policy focus.

After the government’s $130 billion JobKeeper legislation had been pushed through Parliament unamended, it was Greens senate leader Larissa Waters who offered an optimistic take on the upheaval Australia is suffering.

“This crisis has highlighted the extent to which Australia’s safety net has been picked away at for 30 years,” she said …  In just a few short weeks we’ve seen the beginnings of a stimulus that could set us up for better things and play to our collective strengths … It’s a chance to think how we want this country to go forward, and hope to dream for a better future.”

Greens parliamentary leader Adam Bandt told the Saturday Paper that this is the moment for Australia to be ambitious in its thinking about the recovery.

“I see a debate looming about the pathway out; it will be a choice between blue austerity or green growth,” he says. “The Green New Deal is about borrowing to invest to make more money and grow out of the crisis, versus others who argue the only way is cutting, [which] will only increase the crisis.”

He is confident that a sweeping “government-led plan of investment and action to create a clean economy and a caring society” is still possible – perhaps even more viable in the wake of Covid-19. “A three-decade-old neoliberal rule book has been thrown out the window,” he says.

He often cites the work of economist and former climate change adviser Professor Ross Garnaut, whose recent book Superpower: Australia’s Low-Carbon Opportunity has captured cross-party support for highlighting the prospect that a combination of cheap and abundant renewable energy and low interest rates could revitalise manufacturing in this country and see us exporting clean power to Asia.

In the next month or two, the Greens will announce their recovery plan, ahead of the release of the full Green New Deal policy next year. “Everything will be costed and funded,” Bandt promised.

Just before the Covid-19 shutdown, Bandt began a national tour to promote the Green New Deal, announcing a $28 billion plan to build 500,000 sustainable new homes over the next 15 years, as part of the party’s vision for universal free housing, education and health.

Bandt noted the Morrison government is going to be forced to act under the pressure of the coming downturn. “The government’s going to need to invest even more if we want everyone to have a decent job on the other side of this crisis. Unless the government wants high unemployment to be a permanent feature in Australia, they’re going to have to borrow and invest even more.”

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 21 April 2020

Keep restrictions for as long as it takes

During the last couple of weeks I have heard and read of many people foolishly urging an easing or end of the regulations that have done so much to keep us safe from the worst of COVID-19.

I was particularly concerned by two headlines in last Friday’s Daily Advertiser. One read ‘Easing restrictions could begin within weeks’, and the other ‘Staggered school return’ and ‘The State’s peak teachers’ union warned against a hasty return to the classroom …’.

Nothing could be worse, for we need to keep the restrictions for as long as it takes.

So that doesn’t mean the NRL bouncing back as early as late May, or NSW trialing an easing of the restrictions, as Premiere Gladys Berejiklian has suggested, or, as US President Donald Trump is now saying, ending the regulations in May.

Talk of an early easing of restrictions is contrary to all medical advice. That has to be the voice we listen to and take notice of, rather than politicians touting for votes from the more gullible elements of our population.

Thankfully some are noting caveats before there is any easing. Health experts are urging us to be patient, saying the number of new coronavirus cases in NSW will need to remain stable for at least another fortnight before any restrictions are wound back.

Dr Stephen Duckett, a health economist with the Grattan Institute, said the measures should remain in place until the number of new cases dropped to the single digits, and then held firm.

“The corner has certainly been turned but it’s too early to say when it will be safe to lift the lid,” Dr Duckett said.”

Naturally enough, the business sector is anxious to see signs the government has an exit strategy.

Business NSW Chief executive Stephen Cartwright said it was “still far from certain how much longer the full restrictions will be needed before the medical experts would sanction such changes.”

Pandemic expert Adam Kamradt-Scott, from the University of Sydney’s Centre for International Security Studies, said the government’s approach to winding back the restrictions would depend on what strategy was guiding its response.

“If you’re going for zero transmission rate, you need to get it down to zero and keep it there for an extended period,” Associate Professor Kamradt-Scott said.

“But if the government is willing to accept that a small level of cases is ok because they are manageable, then yes, probably in about three or four weeks you might be able to see a relaxation of these measures.”

Raina MacIntyre, head of the biosecurity program at the UNSW’s Kirby Institute, said the decrease in new daily cases was due to the overseas travel bans and quarantining measures, not the limits on gatherings or stay-at-home orders implemented on March 31.

For her part, Premier Gladys Berejiklian opened the door to a potential easing-off with extreme reticence this week, dodging questions about what measures may be under review.

She spoke of not wanting to “raise expectations” but said there was “a chance” in the coming weeks “to look at some relaxation” but only if the health experts, who were assessing the situation on a monthly basis, “deem it appropriate”.

As a sobering addendum, she added: “Every time you relax a restriction, more people will get sick. More people will die.”

These thoughts took me to another piece of political propaganda, which was Prime Minister Scotty from Marketing touting that the economy would ‘snap back’ as soon as the crisis eased. I guess it is to be expected from someone whose real-world job used to be in advertising, before he was sacked. But such false optimism is very misleading, and Treasury should have been consulted before the PM peddled more false hopes.

As Greg Jericho pointed out in the Guardian Australia, the economic recovery from coronavirus will be slow, rather than a ‘snap back’.

Hopefully that will allow time for sensible heads to prevail. We need to implement a recovery that does not repeat the mistakes of the past half century, when neo-liberal unregulated capitalism ruled. Instead we must replace it with a green new deal that deals effectively with climate change and social justice, thereby saving the planet and its people.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 14 April 2020

Coronavirus presents us with both climate opportunities and risks

The COVID 19 pandemic is both bad and good news for the environment.

The debate over how governments rebuild economies after the peak of the pandemic has become the new front line of the climate war.

We had the bad news well before the coronavirus wreaked havoc throughout the world. As preparations were being made for the COP26 conference it was clear by last year that the aims set in Paris Agreement would not be met unless even more ambitious targets were set in Glasgow.

The now postponed conference was seen by scientists and many world leaders as the last best chance for governments to set in place critical carbon emissions reduction targets.

The decisions that governments make over the next few weeks over their economies will also decide whether or not the world avoids the worst climate impacts, says Anna Skarbek, director of ClimateWorks, a policy research centre associated with Monash University.

As with other experts Skarbek understands the decision to defer the Glasgow talks, saying that holding them next year gives governments the opportunity to develop stimulus measures in line with Paris goals.

“For the climate this is the time of greatest risk but also of greatest opportunity,” she says.

Should governments spend wisely they can decarbonise their economies even more quickly than they had expected to. “The flipside is that if they don’t, it is a double negative,” she said.

Rather than creating green economies as they seek to spend their way out of the crisis, they will most likely lock in dirty industries, equipment and infrastructure and be left

Last weekend, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, ClimateWorks brought forward the release of a major research project it has conducted into how Australia could use available technology to meet critical emissions targets.

Though couched in determinedly positive terms, the careful language of the report, Decarbonisation Futures, is telling. It outlines how Australians might still have a two in three chance to meet targets consistent with averting the worst predicted climate outcomes.

“Decarbonisation Futures scenarios show that Australia can still reduce emissions in line with limiting the temperature rise to 2 degrees – and if governments, businesses and individuals go ‘all-in’, a 1.5-degree limit could be within reach,” it says.

According to the report, over the past five years technological hurdles have already been overcome that allow for drastic decreases in emissions associated with Australia’s power generation, building stock, transport, industry and agriculture sectors.

Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor said he remained “committed to the Paris Agreement” and would continue to develop a long-term emissions reduction strategy, to be released sometime before the next round of UN climate talks. However, the Morrison government stops short of a net zero emissions target.

During the UN climate conference last December Australia was widely criticised for its insistence on counting carry-over credits.

Despite overwhelming global support for the efforts there is already evidence that the pandemic is damaging climate action.

Just days before the COP 26 meeting was suspended Japan announced its renewed Paris targets, essentially locking in the same goals it committed to five years ago.

The Trump administration cited coronavirus last month as it announced a sweeping relaxation of regulations against pollution from power stations and industry and the abandonment of Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standards.

China is also considering abandoning car emissions standards, according to a Bloomberg report. In the first three weeks of March the Chinese government approved more new coal-fired power plants than it did during all of 2019.

The Andrews government in Victoria in mid-March gave the green light to new gas exploration sites.

And even if world leaders do use the postponement of the Glasgow talks to incorporate carbon emissions reductions into their post-pandemic stimulus plans, experts warn that any delay means that subsequent reductions will have to be even steeper and more shocking to economies.

Having locked down almost all industry during the crisis many leaders, including ours, might not want to subject their countries to the steep reductions in the use of fossil fuels needed to arrest climate change, but they must,  before it is too late.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 7 April 2020

This is a time to band together, while observing isolation

The news that the Government will spend $130 billion over the next 6 months to keep about 6 million Australians in jobs by keeping them attached to their workplaces through a JobKeeper payment of a flat fortnightly $1,500 is of course good news.

Welcome though the good news is we need to look below the surface to find both its faults and motivations.

The chief fault eligibility depends on having been in the same job for 12 months. I did some research and soon learnt that casuals are rarely with the same employer for that long – so in effect casuals aren’t really eligible.

And though the payment is great news for workers it’s even better news for employers, for their businesses will be primed to bounce back once this climate abates. So Scotty from Marketing is really giving a life-line to the same old un-regulated capitalism that workers have had to endure for the past forty years.

My other concern is that in order to save the business world the Government has been quite prepared to abandon its much-lauded surplus. Over the past decade it has shortchanged our education, health and welfare services, thereby consigning large sections of the population to a less than decent life.

And at the same time, zilch for combatting climate change or adapting to what is rapidly becoming a world changed very much for the worse.

These thoughts took me to look at how various commentators such as Norm Chomsky and John Pilger have looked at how we are reacting to the crisis. Because she has just published a new book my mind settled on neither of these two wise old men, but instead on Naomi Klein, a Canadian commentator and activist.

Everyone, but especially leading politicians, should heed her calm, wise but undoubtedly alternative words of wisdom.

It’s not uncommon that, at any given moment, a single issue will escalate online, pulling in scores of participants to battle it out over who has the most “correct” opinion. I’m often searching, consciously and unconsciously, for the voice that can cut through the din and offer respite from the panicked chorus of media. Naomi Klein has often provided me that voice.

I was fortunate enough to be in the audience when Ms Klein was presented with the Sydney Peace Prize in 2018. Her acceptance speech largely focussed on the observations made and solutions proposed in the book “This changes everything: capitalism versus the climate”. I was also privileged to teach that book for the University of the Third Age as a book study group.

Author and activist Klein has long been a critic of consumer culture and its focus on individualism, arguing instead that we need to band together to deal with the world’s crises. “The tricky thing is that we are able to find our best selves in these moments of crisis, of high crisis, but within our economic system, the pressures of the market bear down pretty fast.” Never has this been made more clear than during the coronavirus crisis.

Ever since the publication of her first book, ‘No Logo’, Klein’s precise, impassioned and articulate writing has been a salve for the varied crises of our present moment. She has though continually identified the futility of individualism. “The very idea that we, as atomised individuals, could play a significant part in stabilising the planet’s climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts,” she writes in her newest book, ‘On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal’. “We can only meet this tremendous challenge together.”

Klein observes the way that campaigning provides an in-person remedy for young people to the “branding culture, the constant performance of self, the scarcity of the attention economy”, which is so inescapable. Organising has become the most immediate kind of self-care. She acknowledges how Greta Thunberg subverts all of this, for she rejects the social contract entirely, and the sort of “constant mirroring” to others that stops us from doing what’s necessary.

Many have seen parallels between the threat of the coronavirus and climate change, noting how both require action at a dramatic, global scale. The Schoolies’ Strikes engagement of young people over the past year shows what can happen if we do band together.